I come on here every so often to see what’s going on, and every time I leave disappointed. This is my top 3 grievances at the moment:
-
This place feels dead. It’s usually quite, but lately it really feels like a ghost town. Idk what the actual stats say, but I feel like the amount of comments, posts, and variety seem to have gone down quite a bit over the past few months.
-
The amount of genuinely hateful content has gone up. I feel like Lemmy as a whole used to have better moderation even just last year compared to now. Every time I get on here, I’m seeing more and more gross content that’s either racist or bigoted or just downright gross. This content doesn’t get taken down even when reported. As horrid as Reddit’s moderation is, it’s still not this bad.
-
Outside of the tech communities, there’s no information hygiene anywhere in sight. The news subs publish the most questionable of sources, sometimes outright misinformation… and nobody cares? People don’t criticize weak sources or call out false claims or even value accuracy. I’ve seen multiple instances of users saying something false and getting upvoted for it and a person correcting them getting downvoted for it. Like, what’s even happening?
I don’t know, I feel like when I joined a couple of years ago Lemmy was so much better. It felt more active, the community felt more down to earth, kind, and friendly, and the content was higher in quality. There was much optimism surrounding the Fediverse that’s not there anymore. Now it feels like a more left wing version of Voat than a genuine Reddit alternative. Am I the only one feeling this way or do other people feel the same?
It’s like Reddit a long, long time ago before it started going to absolute shit.
So I’m liking it.
Personally, I’m experiencing the opposite as far as activity. I joined about 1.5 years ago and there’s definitely been a noticable increase in activity in that time. I’m seeing more upvotes and comments than when I joined.
I feel like the voting culture of Lemmy is not conductive to good conversation or anything more than blind agreement. It’s certainly helped by the fact that Lemmy’s algorithm is more willing to show newer posts and comments (as opposed to merely popular ones), but people on Lemmy seem to be very willing to downvote content that they don’t agree with, or downvote news that they don’t like (regardless of the informative quality of said news), or just downvote anything that may contradict their pre-existing notions of how stuff works. It’s more hostile than Reddit, and it seems like everyone, especially in the political communities, is wanting to start an argument here, sometimes over the dumbest things. Look in your average Reddit comment thread, and you see pages of jokes, memes, people sharing stories, and just generally having a good time. Look in your average Lemmy comment thread, and you see two people arguing over a dumb political point.
I’ve actually been having a pretty good time lately. I like that the communities are smaller and more personal (especially compared to coming from reddit where some of the communities I was in were massive).
Depends where you’re looking. It’s not as active as Reddit for sure, but it also has far fewer non-humans too which seems to be the majority of Reddit these days - either repost bots or even comment bots so the activity isnt real, it’s a mere simulation. I don’t fear that here. PugJesus is real. 😃
From the communities ive interacted with, defs feels dead compared to other places. Does suck when scrolling through the news feed and getting caught up way too quickly.
But there seems to be a fair chunk of aussies on here thats kept me on here
Personally, I haven’t noticed a decrease in content, but I have noticed a significant dropoff in quality of content, and in it’s place, has mostly grown toxicity. None of the racism, or anything that extreme (although, from what I’ve seen, my instance moderators have been doing a good job,) but so much of the content is insults, unhelpful snark, doomerism, elitism, and just general bad-faith arguments. It feels like all those who wantted to be helpful or supportive have given up or left, meaning no high-quality content and no meaningful discourse.
That said, it also feels like a wider cultural shift thats happened in the last year or so. Online culture as a whole feels more toxic, with fewer places to go for positivity or constructivity, and far more hate and abuse.
I don’t really see the widespread racism you claim exists here, with Lemmy being one of the least racist Western online spaces I’ve ever been in…
And idk what you mean by dead. Compared to what? I feel like I see the same usernames pop up often, because we have a community of regulars. I don’t think I need it to be more “active”, and it certainly beats the more bot-infested “larger” online communities.
Also, if you really dislike the “leftist” population/takes on Lemmy, why don’t you just go back to Reddit? Like, in earnest, they have a lot of uhh “right wing” stances and all big subreddits support the American empire and silence anyone who disagrees. Just make a new account and resettle there, it’ll be more to your liking!
Building critical mass is difficult because people created communities that have barely any activity.
The way you build a platform is to encourage less categorization until a specific topic needs to be split off.
deleted by creator
It is old enough to have niche communities but they are very rare. It is still dominated by memes, politics and the bad side of tech
Sounds like you should adjust your subscriptions?
Tech communities make sense. That’s where a lot of it started on other sites (Slashdot, Digg, Reddit) and the first user-base I’d expect to move. The rest will likely stay where they’re “comfortable” until the water gets too hot
Sad.
Feels dead.
Just like my will to live…
Might pick up ham radios as a hobby if I wasn’t so scared and introverted to talk to old white dudes in America… yea that’d feel weird… most ham radio people are right wing libertarians… not my cup of tea… also not white… which might be weird when they start asking what my favorite sports team is or what my favorite music is… not American enough to answer those questions lmfao…
I’m in a similar boat re ham radio. It seems like a cool hobby, I’m into the idea of building and running radios. Even better if you add backpacking, DX-ing, “fox hunting” or other ham radio games. But the culture is a little off for my taste. People are generally polite and friendly enough on short contacts but you can hear some bad takes if you chat long enough. It would be cool to see younger, diverse, more left leaning new hams, it would get me more interested in going on air.
Unsubscribe from every community and build your feed again
Imagine social media as an upsidedown parabola (like an arc), where the x axis is time, and the y axis is quality.
The start of a new social media platform would be towards the bottom left. As they grow and add new features, their quality improves. Over time, however, they will ‘peak’ in quality. Then, they begin to introduce anti-consumer practices, such as API restrictions, ads, sponsored posts, etc. Their quality dwindles until either the platform shuts down or becomes a horrible echo chamber.
Using this analogy, Reddit right now would be in the latter half of the graph, as it has become an echo chamber filled with bots, ads, and API restrictions.
Lemmy currently is more like approaching the peak for the parabola. It’s great for now.
Sure Lemmy is open-source, self-hostable, but it’s potential downfall would be its userbase. It’s starting to have the same issues as Reddit: Don’t comply with every else’s opinions, get downvoted to oblivion. Of course, downvotes don’t mean much on here, but getting banned would.
In its own way, Lemmy is starting to become an echo chamber for tech/Linux enthusiasts, radicals, and those exiled from Reddit.
